MY COMMUNITY BOARD

"The heavy atoms in cameras will continue to be replaced with bits of weightless software, shrinking them down to microscopic dots scanning the environment 24 hours a day. The mirrorworld will be a world governed by light rays zipping around, coming into cameras, leaving displays, entering eyes, a never-­ending stream of photons painting forms that we walk through and visible ghosts that we touch. The laws of light will govern what is possible.

New technologies bestow new superpowers. We gained super speed with jet planes, super healing powers with antibiotics, super hearing with the radio. The mirrorworld promises super vision. We’ll have a type of x-ray vision able to see into objects via their virtual ghosts, exploding them into constituent parts, able to untangle their circuits visually. Just as past generations gained textual literacy in school, learning how to master the written word, from alphabets to indexes, the next generation will master visual literacy. A properly educated person will be able to create a 3D image inside of a 3D landscape nearly as fast as one can type today. They will know how to search all videos ever made for the visual idea they have in their head, without needing words. The complexities of color and the rules of perspective will be commonly understood, like the rules of grammar. It will be the Photonic Era."

Listen to the new episode of Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, here in conversation with Geert Lovink.

Playing for Team Human today: media activist and scholar Geert Lovink. Geert will be helping us see how an understanding of the political economy is not enough. We have to reacquaint ourselves with the experiential layer of our humanity and even reclaim our sadness to counter the stultifying effects of platform capitalism. Today, when our sources of information are intimately intertwined with our social lives, it’s not as simple as just “going offline.” How can we overcome the anti-human agendas embedded in our technology?

Today’s show reaches back to the origins of what became known as “tactical media” — using interactive media to promote the human agenda. Geert makes the case for reawakening this sensibility. You can learn more about Geert at networkedcultures.org and discover his forthcoming book Sad By Design: On Platform Nihilism.

"In the latest study measuring the effects of social media on a person’s life, researchers at New York University and Stanford University found that deactivating Facebook for just four weeks could alter people’s behavior and state of mind. The study found that temporarily quitting Facebook led people to spend more time offline, watching TV and socializing with family and friends; reduced their knowledge of current events and polarization of policy views; and provoked a small but significant improvement in people’s self-reported happiness and satisfaction with their lives.

What’s more, the researchers found that the deactivation freed up on average an hour per day for participants. And the people who took a break from Facebook continued to use the platform less often, even after the experiment ended.

“Our study offers the largest-scale experimental evidence available to date on the way Facebook affects a range of individual and social welfare measures,” the researchers wrote. "

We should talk about it comrade. Our current web site is designed for computers and not smart phones. Slow media, not instant. We plan to do some improvements, but of course we can't compete with the technology of Facebook. Yes, a Memefest app would be great. But I am not sure how we could make this as we don't have the money. Do you have any ideas how could we approach this?

'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism

Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is a chilling exposé of the business model that underpins the digital world. Observer tech columnist John Naughton explains the importance of Zuboff’s work and asks the author 10 key questions

While classical melancholy was defined by isolation and introspection, today’s tristesse plays out amidst busy social media interactions. Geert Lovink on ‘technological sadness’ – the default mental state of the online billions.

"Our main interest in this analysis is to try to explore some of the forms and methods of interventions that different political actors or power structures can use to control and conquer online sphere. Here we will mostly speak about hidden, indirect actions, interventions done by the unknown actors, individuals with hidden or fake identities, companies without visible ties to government officials, political troll armies and troll lords, or even “artificial” entities.As usual in our investigations we will try to quantify and visualise some of those forms and try to detect and understand some patterns."

A small starting experimental project on the new concept of pleasure media and (un)learning photography that we are exploring done by our students here in Kathmandu. The pleasure media concept started to emerge at our 2016 Memefest titled "Pleasure". We are now spending a three week workshop with students from various backgrounds in Kathmandu to explore - what we see as a new media concept further. This are some early explorations. More to come!

You will remember our last big Memefest titled PLEASURE. So here we go:

"For many of her clientele, who are almost exclusively white right-wing men because she finds herself unable 'to be even fictionally cruel to any other type of man,' that fetish is serving a powerful woman. Maybury derives her pleasure comes from forcing those men to see the contradiction between their love of powerful women and their support for political parties that actively work to limit women’s rights and empowerment."

This is fantastic evidence in showing how brands can be hacked and used a vehicles for political campaigns. The article reveals how Cambridge Analytica has "Waponized" brands in order to promote Donald Trump. The key question opened for me is: Can we reverse engineer the process and use brands to influence social change? What is highly interesting here is the use of fashion as s key cultural medium.

Back from our magic trip in south Italy, where we were taking part of the festival "The Land of Bread" in Matera, presenting the ideas behind our Food Democracy book in a festival lecture and three Lipstick+Bread workshops. One of the many amazing parts was visiting Lecce and a small village next to it where we were hosted for several days by the beautiful family of our fratello Antonio Rollo. The video is from a while ago and shows the father, mother and daughter making incredible breads at the only community oven in the village they have been running for many years. Just amazing!! The breads, bread dishes, the tomatoes, sardines, pasta and the olive oil(!!!) we ate were pure heaven and this unique culture of baking, bread making and food, music, friendship and hospitality will be for ever cherished in our memories. More soon!

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'Advertising companies and data brokers have been quietly collecting, analysing, trading, and selling data on people for decades. What has changed is the granularity and invasiveness at which this is possible. Data brokers buy your personal data from companies you do business with; collect data such as web browsing histories from a range of sources; combine it with other information about you (such as magazine subscriptions, public government records, or purchasing histories); and sell their insights to anyone that wants to know more about you.'

Please share this and spread the news into the data sphere as far as possible!! I met Shahidul Alam two years ago in Kathmandu where we worked together with photography students at a international workshop. Shahidul is a one of a kind media and human rights activist, the founder of Pathshala Media Institute in Dhaka, one of the best photography schools in the world and a brilliant photographer.

Additional Commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DB) Abdul Baten said a team of Detective Branch of police detained Shahidul from his Dhanmondi residence for interrogation over his Facebook posts on the ongoing student protests................................................................Internationally renowned photographer Dr Shahidul Alam, Managing Director, Drik, was forcibly abducted from his house in Dhanmondi, Dhaka after 10pm on 5 Aug 2018. According to security guards of the apartment building and other eyewitness reports, there were roughly 30 to 35 men, in plain clothes, who claimed to be from the Detective Branch (DB), who went upstairs, brought down Dr Alam, who was screaming as he was forcibly pushed into the waiting car, a HiAce, with the words Popular Life Insurance, written on the outside. They taped up the CCTV camera, and took away the CCTV camera footage. The guards were manhandled and locked up. His partner Rahnuma Ahmed, was in a neigbouring flat, raced downstairs on hearing the scream, but the car carrying him and two other cars waiting outside, sped away.